


The Ghosts That We Knew

by bamfsback (anomalagous)



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-29
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2017-12-24 23:37:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/946031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalagous/pseuds/bamfsback
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of vignettes dealing with the death of Kurt Wagner and beyond. Kurtty (eventually).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

It had been difficult, the same sort of endlessly annoying, tedious and drawn-out feeling he'd gotten when his uniform had gotten so soaked through that the water had reached his fur, and everything became an impossible vacuum-sealed combination of clingy spandex and clingy fur. It'd taken what had seemed like  _forever_  to peel himself out of the ridiculous ensemble, in those instances, and every moment of it had felt like a literal fur-pulling agony. Not, as it turned out, that it had actually been anything even remotely resembling  _agony_. Not that it had been even in the same family of sensations.

And not that this had been something so petty as removing the red and black.

When he finally slipped free of his body and the sheer pain it had been experiencing, the relief that Kurt Wagner felt was enormous. It was a bigger, broader, wider feeling than he'd ever felt before, something indescribably large, larger than felt could fit inside his body-which was just fine, suddenly, because suddenly he knew he had no  _ties_  to that body any longer. The process of dying, he understood now what he had always suspected, was itself terrifying and painful, but the state of  _being dead_ , after the dying, was actually more of a  _comfort_  than living had ever been.

Still, beyond the euphoria that faded to comfort, Kurt was filled with the nagging feeling of having left something unfinished, something that was keeping him from really being able to answer to call that was showering down on him from above. There was something he needed to do first.

The world around him had grown hazy and soft-focus, and even as he realized he could look around him and see the grief-stricken faces of those he had called friends and family for so long, gathered around the shell he'd left behind, he realized something else; he could 'phase', much like one of his oldest and dearest friends could, through the ground and move at his whim regardless of what had once stood as a physical barrier. He also realized that the one thing he needed to do lay in the medical labs below Utopia's ground. Like a sigh, he drifted downwards, passing through his own body and rock and metal, wires and infrastructure.

Time took on a distorted feeling that had no meaning; Kurt could feel no sense of  _hurry_  so divorced from his flesh and bone, from the heart in his chest which had kept time and tempo for every moment of his life. By the time he got where he was going, the sun had already finished setting, and  _someone_  had gotten there before him.

Their forms were as insubstantial-looking as he imagined he must look to them, if they could see him at all. Kurt had no reason to believe they could. Still, he could make out what was going on if he concentrated, like the effort of will it took to hold on to something that was almost out of reach. Logan's squat, dense form with both hands pressed against the metallic cylinder , his forehead leaning against its viewing port. Kitty's own blurry image inside, both hands over her mouth. He could feel the heartache radiating off of them in waves, and briefly his entire being-what was left of it-was overcome with regret. He hadn't even gotten to say  _hello_  to Kitty, much less  _goodbye_ , not since she'd returned from being lost in the stars, and now...

...now it was too late.

Too late to make amends, too late to tell Scott where he could  _shove_ his terrible crusade, too late to remake decisions that he knew in his heart he'd never have made any other way  _anyway_. Kurt felt heavy, like there was a great inertia pulling him downwards, watching the shadow play of the man who might as well have been his brother tell the closest friend he'd ever had that there would be no happy reunion for them, not now or ever again. Logan should never had found cause to carry  _that_ burden, too.

Yet, as he watched, Kurt became slowly aware of something. A shift in the palette of colors his friends were made of, or perhaps more accurately a shift in his perception. He could see, suddenly, the dark patches over their hearts, the places where their souls had been battered, pieces torn away by loss and life and villainy. There were so many holes, so much pain and patchwork in the both of them, that Kurt knew he would never be able to make up the difference. Just as suddenly, he knew that he  _could_ do  _something_.

He really had no actual  _inside_  or  _outside_  any more, but it still  _felt_  like reaching inside of himself and tearing free small pieces of his immortal  _self_. Fragments of whatever ineffable star-stuff made him unmistakably  _Kurt Wagner_  and no one else-he tore them free with a strange wrenching sensation of not-pain and rolled them between his 'fingers' until they had formed into small, lopsided spheres. Without any better idea of what he was doing than the instinct to do it, Kurt reached forward, letting his hand pass through Logan's body until he could place the little piece of himself into one of those terrible, aching voids.

The darkness in his friend lit up from inside with the addition, and Logan seemed none the wiser. Kurt smiled, very faintly.

"My dearest friends. You must not cry too much for me. I know the pain is great but it will fade in time. And here, this way...there is always a piece of me with you, a _part_  of you now, you will not be alone. I will be watching, I will be with you." He knew they couldn't hear him, but it almost felt better for Kurt to keep up the concept of the words, even as he eddied forward and reached through the containment shell to place the second bit of soul-stuff into the darkness of Kitty's heart.

Unlike with Logan, there was the faintest echo of a physical sensation as he did this, and Kitty drew in a sudden, almost helpless breath. Her eyes came up and for a moment, just one long protracted beat of a heart he had no longer, she was looking straight at him. Not  _through_  him, but  _at_  him, her face shocked and wild with sorrow. He could see her lips move without the sound accompanying.

'Kurt?'

He had just enough time to smile with all the love he'd ever felt, to release the piece of himself to her care, before the light flared around him and he was finally Called Home.

 


	2. Chapter 2

There are rules, what you're supposed to do the first _day_ after a loved one dies...then the first _week_...then the first _month_...all the way to the first _year_ , to the first _Yartzeit_. When it was Peter she was mourning, she had drug herself through it all, like clockwork, like an automaton dragging behind it the weight of a crushed and broken heart. But she had done it, all the way through, and she had come out the other side not like a phoenix but like something stumbling out of hibernation, weak and fragile and tremulous but _alive_.

 When it was Kurt she was mourning, she'd done nothing at all.

 It wasn't that Kitty didn't feel the grief, or that her German friend hadn't deserved to be honored in such a way. Quite the contrary, in fact: the pain of his passing had been so great it had swallowed her whole, a foe enormous and insurmountable that went with her every moment she went insubstantial and haunted her sleeping hours. Kurt's absence in her life, as she tried to pull it back together and install it into a rhythm, was unchartable, the leviathan in the deep. The heat-death of her capacity to care. She could not turn to look at it, she could not address it, she could not listen to the howl of the winds in her own heart or it would be all she'd ever do again.

 She never finished mourning Kurt. She never started. She just put it aside and moved forward and turned the lights off on the parts of her that played pirates in the Danger Room and stayed up until three am watching Errol Flynn and went to every two-bit circus that rolled its way through New York and watched the acrobats with the eyes of an enchanted child.

 It wasn't accurate to say she never thought of him now, years after the accident, but it _was_ perhaps accurate to say that the ache of his loss had become something she'd learned to live with. He didn't fill her every waking thought. Not every dream was haunted by his bright, sad eyes. Except--except now, watching the news of the heavy rains in Germany and watching the flooding tear through the landscape Kurt had once introduced her to as _home_ , in a year that felt like it was a million years away, he was fresh on her mind. The distressed, unhappy faces of the displaced German refugees stirred a simulacrum in her mind of the fuzzy blue elf, his voice full of pain and compassion. He had always cared for his people, whether that be the X-Men or mutants or Germans or the Roma, often times far more than the last two groups had ever cared for him. He would have wanted to go home, to help the helpless, to touch and bolster the few remaining scraps he had left behind him of the parts of his childhood he had cherished.

 She took the Blackbird without warning or asking permission that evening, headed for Bavaria.

 The plane mostly flew itself, and in the time it took to get from New York to Germany--even at such an accelerated pace--Kitty looked over the small portfolio she had taken from her office. Now that she had it all together in one place, it seemed so _paltry_ ; just a few names, not even enough to fill up a printed page, of people Kurt had once known that remained alive. Feuer the Fire-Eater, whose name was of course not really Feuer, Annalisa, who had been Amanda's alternate for the acrobatic performance, an old priest in a small town near to Winzeldorf whom Kurt had apparently written letters to his entire life outside of Germany. A handful of others, people whom Kitty had never met, whom she realized abruptly may not have even known Kurt had passed away. What could have Father Schroder thought, when the letters suddenly stopped? Did Annalisa wonder why no more Christmas presents arrived from America, clumsily but lovingly wrapped? Did--

 --no. It was too much. Putting a hand over her eyes, Kitty pushed the papers to the side and waited for the alert that would tell her she needed to help the plane land somewhere discrete and out of the way of the swollen Danube. She would have to deal with them one at a time, nor risk drowning in something far more dangerous and more potent than the dirty flood water.

 She took a day to deal with each of the names on the list. She had to; every encounter was a _process_ , a _production_ even, no matter how kind Feuer was, no matter how sad and understanding Father Schroder had seemed, no matter how lovely Annalisa's children were. Every day she had to dismantle some of the armor around her heart, take to the fortress she'd built inside herself with a wrench and a crowbar until she'd torn pieces of it down, only so that she could let out the pain and sorrow and the phantom images of a departed blue and fuzzy friend that were appropriate to each situation. She sat over coffee, tea, and most often _Dinkelacker_ \--of course--and reminisced, made golems out of her memories so that she could pour all her associated emotion into them and carve them into life with a gesture and hastily murmured Hebrew. Rage. Guilt. Defeat. Pain. Loneliness. Love. Fear. Everything she had ever felt for or about Kurt, shaped like clay by her hands and heart and laid out on the kiln of the strangers' attentions, baked by the fire of their shared longing for a man long gone.

 By the time she crossed the last name off of the list, Kitty felt like she'd been upended and all of her contents poured out. There was a hollowness in her almost the shape and size of the immeasurable grief she'd held in her, and she was afraid to explore the edges of the wound, unsure if she was more scared of finding it wasn't all mended or finding that it _was_.

 The last day was supposed to be for herself, to recover her composure before she dove head-first back into the chaos and violence that so often surrounded the school. She bought a cheap wind-up camera at a local tourist shop and spent most of the day wandering through Winzeldorf, taking pictures of the churches or the gardens in the mid-summer sweat; anything that caught her eye and made her think of Kurt. She found, as she filled up the roll of film, that it wasn't pain that she felt every time she pressed the shutter. For the first time since Kurt had died, she could think on him with fondness that wasn't riding on the tail of the sharp-toothed monster that had been her _missing_.

 Kitty had been afraid it would feel like a betrayal. Instead, letting go felt more like she had finally stopped the crying she'd never started, finally accepted the reality that Kurt was _gone_ , and while that wasn't _okay_ , it wasn't the end of the world.

  _It wasn't the end of the world_.

 As the sun set, she packed a late dinner and hiked out to the ruins of Schloss Wagner.

 The villagers of Winzeldorf had more or less torn the manor down with their bare hands and their farming tools, in the days after Kurt's birth, fueled by their rage at Mystique's murderous deceit and by their own ignorant fear. That had been years and years ago, but no one had ever come to clean up the mess or clear away the broken stone and rotted wood. It was if the locals felt the whole place was cursed, and maybe they did--their ignorance seemed to have no end. Still, their ignorance meant it was a good place to pick her way onto some broken bit of wall and have some solitude to tie her newfound sense of peace off with.

 Kurt wouldn't have wanted her to bury herself in grief anyway. It had been hard, trying to pull back enough to get perspective, but it felt so obvious now. He'd have been so _upset_ with her, letting the pall of his death drain the color from _everything_ in her life. She had spent three years failing to honor his memory, failing to honor his passing, more or less _failing him_ at every turn, and Kitty Pryde was convinced she was not going to _fail Kurt_ any longer. No, now was time to try to embrace the _joie de vivre_ he'd left behind, and go back out to _live life_ again instead of simply _surviving_. Feeling a smile creep over her face, Kitty raised her beer to the last rays of the sunset. If she could not honor him as was befitting _her_ faith, she could at least honor him with his. "The Lord be with you, Fuzzy."

 She had just about gotten the beer to her mouth when the _absolute last sound_ she expected to hear rasped itself into being out of the darkening woods behind her. The _last voice_ she could have anticipated, which was almost _ironic_ given everything else.

 "And also with you, _Katzchen._ "


	3. Chapter 3

It had turned out that the pieces of himself that he'd left behind were less like time capsules of love and fondness and more like _homing beacons_ , things the rest of his soul--the only thing he _was_ any more--would forever be pulled to. Heaven was Heaven, certainly, but the missing pieces of his self had called to him, itched like old wounds in a place where he should have had no concept of a body to be _wounded_ , much less wounds themselves.

 He had answered one of them not long after he'd died.

 Kurt had never really understood the full story, not that it had ever mattered. Someone had cursed Logan and sent his mind through literal Hell while his body had been ridden by demons trying to what what demons _always_ did, which was most explicitly wreck havoc on the earthbound. While this occurred, there was nothing Kurt could do but watch from afar and fear for his friend's immortal soul. But then--then Logan's soul had been returned to his body, and an all-out brawl had erupted between Logan's indomitable will and a horde of demons set out to dominate it anyway. That, as it turned out, Kurt _could_ help with, and so he'd been sent to prevent the Adversary from gaining such a powerful ally as Wolverine's _mutation_. It'd almost been _fun_ , but for the souls at risk at the time.

 Then he'd returned to Heaven, and waited, expecting the other call to come.

 But it never did. Time had moved on, _Kitty_ had moved on, and although she'd suffered, certainly, in ways he could not reach her to soothe, she'd never gotten to the point where her soul had been in peril or that she had _needed him_ so much that the need itself drew him down like filings to the lodestone. So instead, Kurt's sense of self had sunk into the background of Heaven, and faded out in a whitewash of light. Lost to any idea that he had or had _ever_ had a distinct existence and _individuality_ , time and space lost all meaning entirely. He simply _was_ , even though he was no longer properly _himself_.

 So it was that when he was suddenly and rather unceremoniously put back into a body, it was a _terrible shock_.

 The air was too visceral, too thick, too corporeal, and it stirred sounds around him, moved the hair across his—his body. He was immediately overcome with a sense of extreme claustrophobia, like he was a being of ineffable, infinite size and space being condensed into a rigid, immutable shape. He felt like he’d been stuffed into a tiny box, confined into this shell of blood and bone and so many noises, so many aches and pains that he couldn’t even begin to catalogue. Terror closed in on him for a few long moments, and he felt his heart slam in his chest like an engine struggling to life, erratic but picking up speed and regularity. He broke out in a cold sweat, he opened his mouth and his nose and hauled in a frantic breath that tasted of a spent fire. With that flavor on his tongue, so terribly sharp and unpleasant, he began to realize there was a certain amount of familiarity to the whole experience. It wasn’t a box, so much as a suit, a uniform he’d worn some time before, in what seemed to be an epoch ago, and he had the vague but certain sense he’d worn it well.

 He opened his eyes slowly against the sharp daylight, unfurling his eyelids in stages as if to let himself readjust to the idea of seeing again in stages. The sky was the first thing he could really make out and identify, before the rest of the world came into focus around it; treetops, a dense forest somewhere that had only recently had a nearly perfectly circular clearing carved into it in a column. The forest had a familiar feel to it in a way he couldn’t articulate, being it was generally just trees and other plants, but that wasn’t particularly important when compared to other things, so he set the nagging feeling aside.

 First he had to figure out where he was. And who he was.

 It took two or three tries for him to feel like his limbs were really responding, but eventually he got himself pushed into a seated position. The forest was as lively as a forest in the middle of winter was ever going to be, but all around him in a perfect circle that matched the hole in the trees, the ground and dry grass had been charred black. There was no evidence of the fire that had obviously left its mark beneath his body now; none of the trees were on fire and he could find no sign of smoke. That got set aside too. Focus on the immediate.

He was naked. That was pretty immediate. Also immediate: he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been expecting when he first looked down at his body, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t it. He was definitely a he, by the looks of things, but he was growing less sure whether or not he was actually human as he’d assumed. He was, after all utterly covered in short blue fur. He didn’t have enough fingers, but he had too many limbs. Yet the idea of having a tail was another of those things he felt like should be frightening but wasn’t. Instead, it felt right. He was supposed to have a tail. He’d always had a tail, hadn’t he?

After a few minutes of staring blankly at his hands and tail, he decided there was _no point_ in wondering about the immutable facts of this strange body.

He needed to find clothes, first and foremost. He rolled to his feet slowly, testing his toes and the balls of his feet against the ground until he found the easiest, most alien-familiar way of supporting his weight with his odd feet. There was no real way to tell which direction led to _civilization_ , so he simply set out, putting his fragile but growing sense of _faith_ in the idea that eventually, he'd find _someone_.

As it turned out, _finding_ someone was not the problem, but not _scandalizing_ them was a bit more problematic. With no sense of identity, much less any _money,_ acquiring _clothing_ was a challenge he felt was almost _beyond_ him. Luckily he seemed almost _built_ for skulking around in the shadows without being noticed and eventually--with far more patience than he really _felt_ , he finally managed to 'borrow' some ill-suited clothes from a line in someone's back yard. He couldn't have said the clothes made him feel more _human_ , but at least he felt less _scandalous_.

That didn't do anything to make him feel less _restless._ Something was pulling at him, tugging at the strings of his newly restored heart, in a near literal direction that caused him to feel, every so often, like he had to _move_ , to follow this silent siren call to where-ever its source was. He ended up wandering all over the city, slipping from shadow from shadow in an instinctive need to stay hidden. Every place he visited, every home he observed from the outside and every rustic crossroads in the rural town, they all stirred something in his chest that he couldn't name, causing the restlessness to grow and a wistful longing to surround it, the entire feeling swelling outwards into something that was nearly an _itching_ , a desperate need to figure out what it was that was causing it. So he followed it, an aimless shadow drifting on the wind, across the city, in and out of the back alleys, and then back out again, back into the forest.

Back into the wild.

Back into the ruins he'd woken up in.

The pressure on his heart only intensified, until he felt like his whole being was made up of a feeling of electric static, distracting his every thought and every move. Just when it felt like he was going to fly apart into a thousand different pieces, the white noise in his mind a deafening roar--

\--it all rushed into a single point of silence.

He was not alone in the ruins.

There was a woman seated on a portion of broken wall nearby, her face turned away from him. Her clothes were conservative, her dark hair pulled back into a neat ponytail. He saw her as if in slow motion, the bend of her neck as she looked down at the food she'd brought with her, the careless grace with which she held the glass bottle in her hand, the edge of her profile as she turned to look into the sunset. In that moment, he was paralyzed, his breath caught in his chest, as a sudden barrage of spotty memories slammed into him, wave over wave of images and sound cut through with the static of painful emotions. The same woman, smiling and laughing with him, her hand on his elbow, teasing a third person he couldn't recall the face of, the image of her passing harmlessly through a wall, expression grim with determination, her voice calling to him through the dust of ages: _Kurt_.

 _Kurt Wagner_.

The very idea of an _identity_ , a reminder of who he'd once been and the memories he'd lost, threatened to overwhelm him. It was interrupted only by the woman's motion, the lift of her hand and her bottle into the sky, and the heart-jerking reality of her voice in the quiet evening air, "The Lord be with you, Fuzzy."

There was no thought, only heartfelt reflex as he found himself speaking in response, one hand lifting, "And also with you, _Katzchen_."


	4. Chapter 4

"And also with you, _Katzchen_."

The words _burned_ , burrowed themselves into her ears, under her skin, into her _mind_ , like the tongue of flame from the Lord God himself, like something she was forbidden to hear. In the moment between hearing and being able to galvanize herself into action, Kitty thought she was going to turn into a pillar of salt, drained of all capacity to feel or move or even _be_ by the familiar timber of the words, the perfect twist and pirouette of the nickname he'd used for her for years upon years.

She put her bottle of beer down slowly, and turned just as slowly, convinced what she would see behind her would be a ghost, if she saw anything at all.

Except there he _was_ , not a ghost at all, not a ghost in the least, standing in the loam and stone and the fallen leaves of the forest floor in ill-fitting borrowed clothes and he just looked so _real_. _Real_ , and worried, lost and alone and found again and Kitty felt her breath catch in her chest, felt her ribcage crowd with the rising ride of...

...rage.

How _dare_ they.

She had no idea who it was who was standing there, wearing the face of her dead friend, but the more Kitty looked at the detail they'd put into the deception, the lopsided level of his eyebrows and his shining, glowing golden eyes, the more it upset her. She slipped off of her perch like the shadow she drew her name from, moving across the space between them with a liquid, dangerous grace.

When she was close enough to touch him, Kitty shifted her weight abruptly, bringing one knee up to drive it brutally into the shapeshifter's groin. He made a choked, pained noise and started to pitch forward, which was enough confirmation for _Kitty_ that this _was_ , at least, a shapeshifter, and not some illusion drawn over her mind to torment her. "How _dare_ you?" She demanded, this time out loud, as she followed the knee strike with a swiftly raised elbow, catching him the second time in the face. There was a satisfying sort of crunch that went with it. "After all of this time? After I finally come to _grips_ with this? Maybe, _maybe_ , I've finally gotten over missing him so much I thought I was going to _die_ , every _day_ , and _now_ you come here and _steal his face_ , while I'm trying to get some _closure_?"

She shifted her weight again, squaring it off onto her leading leg so that she could bring the second one up to bludgeon him in the side of the head with her heel, sending him sprawling to the ground. He half-rolled onto his back, bleeding over his own face, and lifted both hands up to try and stave off her next attack shakily. The little things, the way his tail lashed and coiled like an injured snake through the forest floor, it was all so _right_ that it made her sick, made her vision go red-black at the edges. One arm coiled back, hand rolled into a tight fist. "I don't know who you are or what kind of _sick bastard_ thinks this is a funny joke, but so help me, he deserved to be _remembered_ better than _this_ and I'm not going to let you--"

That was about the time he exploded into a cloud of purple-black smoke.

Her fist ripped through the remnant of brimstone to slam into the ground instead. She was too busy choking on the sudden lungfuls of sulfur and rotten egg scent to really consider how she'd probably just broken the middle finger on her left hand.

Kitty collapsed forward to kneel on the ground, gasping for air. It wasn't even the brimstone--she had been used to that, once upon a time, so used to it she almost didn't _notice_ how badly the evidence of Kurt's teleportation had smelled until someone else pointed it out. Now, against all impossible odds, she wasn't sure if she was gulping to get _fresh_ air or to hold on to those last remnants of smoke that could only mean _one thing_.

She turned to look for where he'd ended up out of the corner of her eyes. He was only a few feet away, on his own knees, blood pouring from his nose over his lips, and into his mouth, where it hung just a little bit agape. He was staring down at his own hands, some parts pained and some parts horrified and some parts excited, amazed like a small child. He must have sensed her looking at him, and he lifted his gaze again, that same expression twisting on itself and becoming a simple, heart-broken sadness. " _Katzchen_...I..."

"Oh, _God_." She sobbed. She could feel herself squeeze her eyes shut, but she turned anyway, crawling over the forest floor until she found him by touch, first a knee, then a thigh, then the real, oh God, the _real solid core of him_ , his actual _body_ , lungs pushing air in and out, warm and fuzzy and _he was really here_.

Kurt was really _here_ and she'd just broken his nose.

Even keeping her eyes closed did nothing to prevent the tears. Three years worth of tears, gathering up at the backs of her eyes, laying siege to the insides of her eyelids until they all slid free seemingly at once. Pitching forward, Kitty grabbed huge handfuls of cloth at the back of his shirt and pulled Kurt towards her, burying her face in his chest where she could hear the percussive tattoo of his heart beneath his ribs. "Oh, _Kurt_ , I'm so _sorry_ , I didn't...I didn't think...I would ever... _you_ would ever..."

His arms moved to wrap around her, holding her tight against him. For a long time, there was just her tears and his embrace, his fingers soothing over the back of her hair, his voice rough and bubbly as he tried not to cry while he kept up the sibilant hush of 'shh, shhh, shh' through his teeth.

Eventually, she pulled back a little, opening her eyes to consider his face. She slipped her hands upwards, releasing the desperate grip on his shirt, to try and clean the blood away from his nose and mouth. The flow had slowed to a sluggish crawl, and Kitty found herself using part of her sleeve to scrub the red out of Kurt's short, dense fur as a means to distract herself while she found her voice again. "I...how long?"

"A few days only." He said quietly, careful not to disturb her attention to his upper lip as he spoke.

She felt herself frown. "Why didn't you call? We would have..."

Kurt shook his head, dipping his head a little to try and meet her gaze with his eyes. She'd thought she would never see those eyes again. Bile rose in the back of her throat, this time, instead of the tears she'd cried out onto his shirt already, but she choked it back, instead trying to concentrate on what he was saying. " _Nein_ , no, Kitty, I...I came back, I was new to this world, _brand new_ , naked as a babe, in mind as well as body. I had nothing to call you with and I did not know, even, who to call, or who to tell them was calling."

"But you knew who I was?" It just didn't make sense.

Kurt's bright eyes slipped a little to the side. "A few memories returned when I saw you. More as you...well. Everything you do, it is like it starts another avalanche, images, sensations, scents, sounds, things from a different life...it is almost too much, it comes so strongly, and in so many pieces. I have not made sense of it all yet."

 _Great._ After three long years of waiting, thinking her hope was dead--murdered by some stupid robot for some stupid fight she wasn't even sure should have happened--and here he was, finally back on solid ground, and he was _broken._ She choked again on an indrawn breath, and tried to settle herself out, hands going from Kurt's wounded nose to his hair. She couldn't help herself from smoothing it back from his forehead and temples, as if trying to offer him comfort for some kind of pain he didn't seem to be feeling. "It's okay. It's okay. You're here, I have the Blackbird, we'll go home and we can fix this. If I have to, I'll get Emma to take all my memories of you and give them to you so you know."

There, he offered the sound she'd been missing most, out of all the times she wished she could hear him speak, call her name, or tease her for some mistake--he laughed. His smile was weak, but it was there, growing little bit by little bit. "Don't you think that will leave me with a very _biased_ opinion of myself."

"Yeah, but it's fine, you had a high opinion of yourself anyway."

Kurt laughed again, looking briefly up into the sky like that could hold back his tears, and then pressed his face to the top of Kitty's head, whispering quietly, "If it is all the same to you, _Katzchen_ , I think it is time I went home."

She couldn't really argue with that.


	5. Chapter 5

Despite everything, they stayed in Bavaria for almost an extra week.

As it turned out, as much as Kurt wanted to go home and go back to the task of living his life, there were a few loose ends he had to stitch together first. Not the least of those loose ends was the task of getting a few changes of clothes that both _fit_ and _suited_ him. It seemed like such a strange pantomime, to go into a store and let someone else lead him to the pieces _they_ thought he might like, much less to have them be _right_ , to have something as simple as a _fashion sense_ stir inside his breast and then awaken, a sleeping Kraken from the deep. By the time they were done shopping Kurt had spent more of Kitty's stipend than he'd really planned, and he was thick with the remembrance of his time _before_ , memories that had scattered to the wind starting to ricochet back and forth from the inside of his skull. Changing from the clothes he'd borrowed from someone's washing line to the ones they had bought did a great deal for _grounding_ Kurt, making him feel more _human_ and less like some alien that had crash-landed on the side of the planet with no idea what direction was even _up_. There was something _comforting_ in the fit of the trousers and the vest which almost seemed to help him keep hold of the memories as they zipped by and to organize them neatly, like a deck of cards slowly being put back into order. By the time the afternoon of the second day had rolled around, he was almost _himself_.

Day by day, they retraced Kitty's steps, and Kurt went from stranded alien to _some kind of miracle_. Like a pauper in search of alms, they visited the people whom Kitty had just shared her _closure_ with and reopened the doors, gathering old memories for Kurt to wrap into bouquets and store in the dusty corners of his mind. There were tears, and laughter--for a moment Kurt thought Annalisa's children would squeeze him right back out of the world, a moment where he sputtered breathlessly after Father Schroeder dumped an entire font of holy water over his head.

It was almost like picking pieces of himself back up and tying them back on, building a homunculus of what he used to be from wire and plaster and stories of a lifetime ago.

By the end of the week, Kurt felt he had reassembled enough to go back to America without being utterly _overwhelmed_ by the experience. Kitty wouldn't trust him with the act of flying the Blackbird, so instead he found himself curled comfortably in the co-pilot seat, holding a cup of take-away coffee in both hands. "You know, it's almost strange, how natural this all seems. I feel like I ought to be a bit more _perturbed_ by it all than I am."

Kitty moved quietly, coming forward from the last pre-flight checks in the back of the plane to touch the top of his head fondly. "I don't think I want to really think about it too hard, Kurt, it might all fall apart. I'd like to have you around for more than a week before that happens, okay?"

He laughed, quietly, tipping his head so that he could watch her as she moved around him, fingers trailing through his curls briefly. "I'm not planning on leaving any time soon, but you know what I mean. When I was little, I thought...you got one chance. Now it feels like it is more likely than not that this isn't _true_ , not with the company we keep. And here I am, feeling like I should be astounded that I am _alive_ , like _Lazarus_ , brought forth whole from the ashes, but I'm more astounded that I've _put myself back together_ and I'm not having trouble with my memory any longer."

The sigh as she sat in the pilot's seat was as much from her voice as it was from the whisper of cloth against the seat itself. "I mean it, Kurt, don't pick it apart. Not yet. _Please_. For me. We just...it was so _long_..."

"Hey, _hey_ , I'm sorry, I did not mean to upset you. I will be as quiet as a churchmouse, just please..."

Amusement started to curl one half of Kitty's mouth, chasing away the sad loneliness that had started to cast its pall over her face. For not the first time since he'd returned, Kurt found himself comparing Kitty's face now from the pictures in his mind that were coming in more and more clearly with every breath he took. She was older. Not only physically, but _mentally_ , in her _soul_ , something had changed while she was part of the stars, or maybe while he was gone. The girl he'd left behind was long gone, transmuted through the alchemy of life into a woman that, on rare occasion, Kurt wondered how well he knew.

The impishness in her expression as she started to power up the plane, however, was very familiar. "Bullcrap, I don't think you can be quiet for more than five minutes before you'll go crazy. Even less time if you have to stay _still_ , too."

"Oh, is that a _challenge?_ Well, you are _on_ , _Katzchen..._ "


End file.
